The Muddle
“We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school”
- No Surrender, From Born to Run (1984)
From the chatter about Bruce Springsteen’s Super Bowl non — advertisement for Jeep, you might think that certain segments of America cared more about that two-minute story board than about the football game which, for Tom Brady fans, was all about their Boss.
Springsteen has gotten clobbered by some die hard purists for selling out. This may be the crowd who still can’t forgive Dylan for strapping on an electric guitar at Newport. If Springsteen is in need of a paycheck, and I don’t think he is, there are plenty of ways for him to make a buck.
Others complain that he’s getting too political, making me wonder where they have been living for the past twenty years. Bruce has been making his own sort of sometimes goofy, often muddled political statements since at least the Reagan years.
And many who like the general bent of Springsteen’s politics have gotten steamed that his paean to an elusive “Middle” in America and its politics glosses over the racial and class divides that don’t need to be compromised away but rectified, purged, their studio burned and their ashes buried.
Yup. The Boss missed the moment.
Springsteen’s politics have always been a muddle. Back in the 90’s he turned down invitations to the White House from the Clintons, not wanting to mix his art with their political brand. That was a position I’ve often wished that he had clutched tightly.
Bruce Springsteen’s body of work is beyond any political moment. His songs are about a vision.
It is about assessing the reality of American life against the metrics set by an American dream. It is a white man’s version of the post World War II American dream, which includes a yearning for a more inclusive society.
That work has little to do with policy prescriptions or endorsement of any candidate.
Springsteen’s arms-length attitude toward politicians collapsed during the Iraq War, when torture and prisoner rendition left Bruce feeling the urgency of getting George W out of the White House so fiercely that he campaigned for the milquetoast John Kerry. I saw him at the last Kerry rally of that 2004 campaign, at a park in Cleveland, Ohio, and, to be kind, it was less than inspiring.
I still wish he had stuck with his musical commentary on the danger to our liberties and our neighbors raised by the war on terror, evoked in Devils and Dust as well as Magic, his albums of that era, and left advocacy to those he inspired.
Probably his sharpest political moment came during the 2008 primary season when, pronouncing, “I’ve seen enough,” he threw his support behind Barack Obama while the primary battle with Hillary Clinton still raged. Suddenly it was January 2009 and there was Bruce singing Working On A Dream from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the Obama inaugural. The moment met the artist.
It’s been five elections cycles and Springsteen still doesn’t seem comfortable in the role of advocating for candidates. He is not by nature a fighter for justice. He has broader appeal than Pete Seeger or Woody Guhtrie could ever dream of in part because his message is less threatening to the powers that be and to the upper middle class aspirations of those who can afford his concert or Broadway tickets. He is clearly a fan of the working class, but don’t confuse that with clear advocacy of the need for those folks to organize unions.
The “political” moments at his concerts, leavened with humanitarian appeals, are seen as convenient bathroom breaks by many of his fans, mostly well-heeled white guys who long ago traded their teenage rebel selves for a three-car garage and life on the cul-de-sac. For me those are some of the finest moments, and his songs, if you follow the verses, illuminate important issues, from toxic masculinity to police violence. He’s not giving us a roadmap, he’s just telling us that there is a road.
His great service to America is his ability to get people who might not think about racist police or exploited farm workers to both tap their foot and place themselves into the shoes of the poor and the exploited. But even in his boldest artistic swipe at institutional racism — the ballad “American Skin” about the 41 shots fired into the body of Amadou Diallo — the songwriter includes a stanza asking the listener to understand the pain of the cop who pulled the trigger. And it is a powerful part of what might be his most controversial song.
What did Bruce miss in his two Super Bowl minutes? In my humble opinion, he failed to properly identify the issue. He evoked Martin Luther King’s optimism about getting to the mountaintop but ignored the long hard years of struggle and sacrifice that King and fellow freedom fighters endured. Surely he has read Frederick Douglass:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, … want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
But that is not a song Springsteen would be likely to write.
As much as Bruce may yearn for a version of unity as neat and square as that white chapel in Lebanon, America yearns for something more. Our problem is not finding the middle.
Our problem is finding ourselves. And that is where the Springsteen canon can serve us in a way that the Middle does not. Faced with empowered leadership that would prefer to distract us, point fingers at others rather than confront the genuine problems we face, I’d rather we absorb the searing portraits of immigrant workers portrayed on the Ghost of Tom Joad album, or heed the anguished plea at the courthouse in “Long Walk Home”, rather than linger on this dusty look at a church nobody prays at in the middle of Kansas.
By choosing that church and that spot as his metaphor Springsteen misses the moment. Not because he chose a chapel instead of a mosque, or because he didn’t make a clear reference to racism and the rise of white supremacist groups. Not every artistic effort needs to address every issue.
Because the middle isn’t enough. The middle today is where both parties meet to take money from the rich to screw the poor.
It is the place where compromises have for too long allowed black and brown families to suffer and die at rates that would never be tolerated on the cul-de-sac.
The middle is not something we find — it is what we make of it. I thought Bruce would know that. Maybe he does.
When the question we face is whether or not the country will act to save Black lives and take action to dismantle the racism that Bruce well knows haunts every street he’s ever walked down (It’s not Clarence Clemons and the E Street band, after all) the search for the middle leads exactly — where? To a four fifths compromise?
Bruce has at times mourned the fact that his following is so tribal. He has tried to break out of his overwhelmingly white demographic, but in truth he is more able to fill a stadium with residents of Tokyo or Berlin than to build a Black audience in America. But he is an extraordinary representative of a wide swath of the country — the good white folks who would like to see change, but would settle for peace.
He missed the mark on this day. But he took his shot, cowboy hat, earrings and all. I’m I’m still ready to pounce when I hear that there will be a stadium tour, this year or next.
Brady will be back next year, they say. Patrick Mahomes has plenty of miles in his tank. And so will Bruce, maybe pushing us all a bit closer toward that dream his music calls us to, way past the middle.
